


Here rest, interred without a stone

by bironic



Category: The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker
Genre: Apologies, Canon Character of Color, Canon Compliant, Canon Het Relationship, Canonical Character Death, Closure, Desert, Djinni & Genies, Evil Viziers, Extended Scene, F/M, Female Character of Color, Fire Powers, Firebending & Firebenders, Ghosts, Goodbyes, Male Character of Color, Missing Scene, POV Character of Color, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-24 23:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6171373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bironic/pseuds/bironic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a thousand years, she deserved to at least know his name. "Ahmad," he told her, touching the knuckles of his iron-bound hand to his breastbone. He wished he could speak for her his true name. Perhaps she could hear him think it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here rest, interred without a stone

**Author's Note:**

> _Now he was real and she was the dream._ A missing-scene story. Spoilers for plotlines related to these characters.
> 
> Title from "Epitaph" by Philip Freneau.

The winds picked up as the Jinni began to mold the glass shards that littered the floor of his weathered palace into a memorial.

They weren't the hot, capricious eddies of his fellow jinn, but neither were they ordinary desert currents. Something prickled at the back of the Jinni's neck. Slowly, he rose and turned.

The breeze whirled itself out, and in its place stood a mirage: a Bedouin girl in a plain thobe with wavy black hair and wide, bright eyes.

"Fadwa," he said.

"You," she replied. Her voice was no louder than a breath, just one more shift of air across the sands. She looked equally insubstantial, like heat shimmer on the horizon. Like how his palace once appeared in the corners of the eyes of the humans whose caravans passed on the nearby ridge.

After a thousand years, she deserved to at least know his name. "Ahmad," he told her, touching the knuckles of his iron-bound hand to his breastbone. He wished he could speak for her his true name. Perhaps she could hear him think it.

She remained quiet, watching him. "Have you been wandering all this time?" he asked. Unbidden, the image came to him of Matthew sobbing into Maryam's skirts at the thought of his mother's spirit lost and wailing in the streets of Manhattan. The Jinni's chest tightened at the possibility that Fadwa had met such a fate while he himself had slept away the centuries.

Her brow pinched. "I don't know," the air whispered. "It's blurry."

Standing straight and unselfconscious, she looked as she had when the Jinni had begun entering her dreams, before he'd torn her mind and her family had had to bind her limbs and eyes with rags. Her throat bore none of the bruises he'd surely left behind before ibn Malik had trapped him in the flask. He suddenly wished he'd made a second copy of her wedding necklace to bring here and bury with her.

"I remember… your hands," she went on.

"My hands, but not my will," he urged her to understand, holding them out palms up. "The wizard bound me to do as he ordered."

She touched the thin skin where her collarbones met. "No," she said slowly. "Not that. I don't remember that day, although somehow I know what happened. What I remember is your mouth. Your…" Spirit though she may have been, her face flushed at the recollection.

He wanted to touch her—to brush her hair behind her ear and caress her heated cheek, smooth his palm down her shoulder, take her small, labor-toughened hands in his—slip off her robes and take her in his arms and have her here in his ruined home where they wouldn't lose themselves in the depths of her imaginings. But now he was real and she was the dream.

He stepped closer. Despite what had happened the last time he'd done so, Fadwa didn't move away. As he reached out, wondering if his fingers would pass through her, memories flashed before him of squeezing her windpipe, her mouth wide and gasping; of her lips parted for entirely different reasons as he moved inside her, her straining body nearly as hot as his.

To his surprise, as he cupped the back of her head, his hand met faint resistance like static charge in the dry air. It yielded if he pressed, but it was enough to provide the illusion that he was touching her.

She gazed up at him.

"I'm sorry," he said. _I didn't know the dangers. I didn't mean to hurt you. I might have risked it anyway. It shouldn't have ended like this._

He leaned down and kissed her forehead. When he pulled away, her eyes were closed.

She opened them slowly. Somber and achingly young, she said, "Thank you."

They stood in the vaulted chamber as the wind moaned through the holes in the ceiling.

Then he drew back his arm as a thought occurred to him. "Where is your father?" Abu Yusuf hadn't left his daughter's side from the moment she'd been stricken until their deaths; strange for him to be absent now.

Her eyes went briefly unfocused. "With my mother, I think." She glanced at the desiccated remains behind the Jinni. "But part of him is near as well. Waiting."

He couldn't help looking about uneasily.

"He's angry with you," she added. 

"I wouldn't blame him," the Jinni allowed.

"For what you did to me," she agreed, "and for taking our name." 

He had thought he'd been doing right by them. He had wanted, with his usual selfishness, to hold on to some connection to Fadwa after he'd remembered what had happened. "Do you mind it?"

"No." A shy smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. "We were married, after all."

He tried a smile in return. "That we were."

The wind grew stronger. Fadwa's hair blew across her face as though she truly stood in this world. Turning her head toward one of the sand-scoured windows, she said, barely audible, "It's time."

There was so much the Jinni still wanted to talk with her about, especially now that he had had a taste of human life. But a flash of brilliant blue distracted him as the sun caught the edge of one of the palace's broken spires.

When he looked back, she was gone.

He wasn't sure how long he stood there, but in time, the shifting shadows called his attention back to his unfinished work. He would need the day's remaining sunlight, given the labor ahead of him. Kneeling once more, he selected the next shard that would allow him to lay Fadwa and her father to rest.

**Author's Note:**

> Cross-posted to [Dreamwidth](http://bironic.dreamwidth.org/330705.html) and [LJ](http://bironic.livejournal.com/364181.html).


End file.
